With the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, Louisiana locks up so many people that 40 percent of those sentenced to serve time in state prisons are instead sent to a local parish jail. This has long created a two-tiered system: People in prisons have access to educational and vocational programs in state-run facilities that the 15,000 state inmates assigned to jails don’t.
A new report released Tuesday shows the consequences of this system can be deadly. Beyond access to classes and job training, the disparities extend to HIV care, too.
While state prisons provide routine HIV testing and treatment and a well-respected, federally funded program to link inmates to medical care on release, HIV care in the jails is “limited, haphazard and in many cases, non-existent,” concluded the Human Rights Watch report.
Of the state’s 104 jails, only five provide routine HIV testing, researchers found. And for inmates who are HIV-positive, treatment is often delayed and inconsistent. “Some days they would give me all of my pills, other days only some of them and once it stopped for a week when they ran out. Another time they gave me somebody else’s meds,” one man told researchers about his time in Orleans Parish Prison.